Carl Icahn has been waiting a long time for this. After years of controversy over his stewardship, Howard Solomon will retire as ceo of Forest Laboratories by the end of the year, and he will relinquish his role as chairman by the time the drugmaker holds its annual meeting in 2014. Meanwhile, a committee has been appointed to choose a successor. He will, however, remain a director. The move comes after Solomon, who is 85 and has been ceo since 1977, has had a decidedly mixed tenure. On one hand, he helped build the drugmaker into a large purveyor of medicines, but more recently, he presided over setbacks that prompted corporate raider Carl Icahn to attack his leadership and successfully place a representative on the Forest board.